Technology Without Industry

Before that it mentioned "Human DNA is 6 GB", but a lot of that is junk and meaningless. "Dead code", so to speak. Hardly what I call efficient.

There are plenty of weird things as well. Why can't humans synthesise vitamin C? My cat can; in fact, most animals can. But not humans and most other primates: we lost this ability. This is probably because at the time we didn't really need it as we got enough from dietary sources, but dropping it just because you don't need it right now is of course a bit silly and short-sighted, but nature doesn't have any foresight of course. This is the sort of thing why species go extinct.

Another well known "design flaw" is the blind spot in our eyes, which is there for no real reason in particular other than what we might call "legacy reasons" in programming terms.

>I know that Comma isn’t as successful as Waymo and probably may not be.

Are you sure about that? Comma is in use by thousands of real people all around the world, who have driven millions of miles with it and derived an incredible amount of value. Waymo is a walled garden tech demo available to a few engineers and a select number of alpha testers within a few square miles of Phoenix, with no timeline at all to mass adoption.

He uses "industry" misleadingly to refer to fragile interconnected dependency.

Once you get to "Build technology that is inextricable from its narrative" he finally states his thesis outright, but how that relates specifically to "comma" (which I guess is comma.ai, his project, which is left unexplained) and Waymo (which is some company with a fragile-dependency solution which I guess it competes with) would have made a more-interesting article. But less unabombery.

Our technologies now rely on a complex and non-optional supply chain (The Industry).

Partly this is due to an increase in complexity, but it's also driven by what "industry" wants.

Things are being designed so they can't be fixed or even used without proprietary parts, consumables or services. The proportion of technology that works that way is increasing.

Call it the "juicero effect". The wifi router, vacuum or watch that won't work without the manufacturer's cloud services. Tractors that you can't service yourself, that only keep working while you have a subscription. Printers that add magic dots and won't accept generic ink. Everything about phones, and increasingly, computers.

This guarantees recurring revenue for suppliers, but the real evil is control.

We're moving towards a world where you don't really "own" things, you're just licensed to use them. You may use them only insofar as the true owner (whoever control the supply of essential parts, consumables and services) allows.

The idea of "technology without industry" is that we can and should have technology that doesn't have these means of control (by industry) built-in.

Comma, for example is open-source. You don't have to buy their hardware, you can hack it yourself. You can fix it yourself. You can collect or share your own data. You can see how it works.

What most companies want to build is an opaque black box. Some will just rent you rides. Even for vehicles you nominally own, "industry" will no doubt lobby to make it illegal to "tamper" with them, for safety reasons. Every ride will add to their moat.

Self-driving car networks will be great... until your account gets cancelled for a terms of service violation. Or because Elon was pissed at your tweet. Or until the day you try to get a ride to a protest or a strike and the car tells you it can't take you there.

This was a great read. It is very thought provoking and inspiring. Something you could read and contemplate every day for a year. Bravo!